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Spent way too much time reading comics over the past couple days when I should've been doing other stuff. But they've mostly been good comics! And Loki: Agent of Asgard printed an excerpt from my fan letter, though it comes across as rather more of a brag than I intended it to be.

I'm not at all happy with the whole Secret Wars thing, or the Battleworld thing, or the God-Emperor Doom thing; as a rule, I find the big mega-crossover multiverse-changing events kind of annoying, because we all know that over the next three to fifteen years the multiverse is going to blossom into overwhelming complexity yet again and will have be torn down and rebuilt yet again.

But I'm looking at the free Preview issue of the post-Secret-Wars new comics, and I'm cautiously optimistic about a bunch of the new titles. For example:

• The preview splash page for Ultimates #1 appears to show a super-team consisting of Black Panther (T'Challa, presumably), Miss America (America Chavez), Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers), Spectrum (Monica Rambeau), and someone who I gather is Blue Marvel (Adam Brashear). For those keeping score at home, that's two black men, a black woman, a Latina, and a white woman. I'm a fan of four of those characters; I hadn't encountered Blue Marvel before, but he sounds intriguing. And it's written by Al Ewing (the writer for Agent of Asgard). I'm really looking forward to this one.
• It looks like the all-women team A-Force will be continuing, written by G. Willow Wilson (writer for Ms. Marvel). That's at least two super-groups containing no white men.
• A new Avengers series looks like it'll include the female Thor, Ms Marvel, and Sam “Falcon” Wilson as a new Captain America (who'll also have his own series).
• It appears that there will be several different Avengers groups (as I gather there've been for some time now); the New Avengers will also be written by Al Ewing, and will include Hulkling and Wiccan, the gay couple from Young Avengers. (Sadly, the cover art shows a female character (Songbird) with a waist that's half the diameter of Clint Barton's biceps.)
• There'll be yet another new Captain Marvel series, this time written by Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, who were the showrunners for Agent Carter. Sad to see Kelly Sue DeConnick leave the title, but cautiously pleased about the new writers.
• G. Willow Wilson will continue to write a new Ms Marvel series.
• The cover for issue 1 of the new Hawkeye series shows Kate Bishop (the Hawkeye from Young Avengers) and an old man, presumably Clint Barton (though he looks much younger in the New Avengers page), and has the tag-line “Hawkeye vs. Hawkeye.” Don't know whether Bishop or Barton will be the main character of the series.
• The cover for the new Spider-Woman #1 shows her in costume, pregnant.
• The tag-line for the new Spider-Man #1 says “Welcome to the Marvel Universe, Miles Morales. Hope you survive the experience!” (A reference to Kitty Pryde's intro from way back when.) Written by Brian Michael Bendis. It looks like there'll be a whole bunch of spider-titles featuring different characters, including Spider-Gwen, Silk, Spider-Man 2099, and Web Warriors.
• All-New Wolverine #1 shows a woman in a Wolverine outfit, with claws. Tag-line: “Best there is at what she does.” I gather that she's X-23, a female clone of Wolverine, who's been an established character since 2004.

There are also a bunch of other series that I don't have any interest in. And I don't know whether I'll like any of the above. But regardless, I'm pleased and impressed with the degree to which Marvel seems to be taking this opportunity to have more diversity in some of its flagship titles, and I'm glad to see that Ewing and Wilson will continue to be writing prominent series.

For an interesting index into what we know of the new series, alphabetically by character name, see Where to Find Marvel's Heroes in Its “All-New, All-Different” Universe—but note that it gives the name of the female Thor, which is a spoiler if you aren't caught up on that series.